This morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education reports that BusinessWeek Will Begin Ranking Undergraduate Business Programs Next Year:

BusinessWeek magazine, which has ranked graduate business programs since 1988, is taking steps to grade undergraduate business programs as well. The expanded rankings will use essentially the same consumer-oriented methodology that underlies the magazine’s ordering of M.B.A. programs. BusinessWeek editors have been meeting with undergraduate business students at the magazine’s New York offices to find out what is most important to them. Results of those focus groups will form the basis of a survey that the magazine will distribute later this year or early in 2006 to undergraduates enrolled in 100 "qualified" business programs. In addition to asking about instructors and academic programs, the survey will plumb students’ opinions about the quality of dormitories, food, and classmates.

At our sympsoium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings, Wendy Espeland & Michael Sauder (both of the Department of Sociology at Northwestern) presented a fascinating paper on what law schools can learn from business schools’ experience with rankings: The Benefits of Multiple Evaluations: A Comparison of Law and Business School Rankings.